Industry News

StarHub Enters a New Venture of Building Smart Homes

StarHub to collaborate with a property developer to enter
the smart home segment.

Singapore: StarHub is one of the latest telecom company to enter
the smart home segment. The company is already set to venture smart vehicles,
smart retail and virtual reality. The smart
home facility will also have other functions, such as analytics and cyber
security. This will help in creating solutions for the Smart Nation goal of the
company.

Mr. Tan Tong Hai, CEO of
StarHub stated, “Currently, we are working with both local and global partners
to build platforms, such as smart homes, intelligent vehicles, connected
buildings, virtual reality and smart retail”. He also added that the project
with the smart-home concept will not be “merely home automation” for the home residents.

The company’s smart home
centre will include new features designed specifically for elders which include
sensors on beds to detect when the person gets out of bed in the middle of the
night, and will turn on the lights automatically. The company is also providing
another prominent feature called “command cockpit” that conducts social media
analytics to gain insights from customer’s activities and it helps in analysis of
Big Data, which can be used for planning purposes by the user. For instance, it
can use data on commuters’ activity to pick out areas that are not sufficiently
well-served by public transport, and it can be used for infrastructure planning
for an ageing population.

TechSci Research depicts with
the growth in the IoT industry, globally and increase in machine to machine
communication, smart homes are emerging at a rapid pace and garner a huge
market potential in the future. Moreover, the government initiatives coupled
with new start up’s entering the market is likely to increase the demand for
smart homes in the coming years.

According to recently released report of TechSci Research, “Global Smart Homes MarketBy Application, By
Technology, By Region, Competition Forecast and Opportunities, 2011 – 2021”, the global smart homes market is projected to cross $
60 billion by 2021. On the basis of application, the market has been segmented
into five categories, namely, Energy Management Systems, Security & Access
Control Systems, HVAC Control Systems, Entertainment Control Systems and
Others. Among these categories, Energy Management Systems dominated the global
smart homes market in 2015. With increasing government efforts to optimize
energy consumption, the adoption of energy management systems is expected to
further increase in the coming years.